Ming Huashang finished her entire bowl of food in a distracted state of mind. All the while, a nagging sense of wrongness refused to leave her — the feeling that something was sitting right in front of her, visible on the surface, and yet she had overlooked it.
Ming Huashang trusted her instincts. The feeling in her gut did not lie. She decided to return to the murder scene once more. Perhaps there really was something she had missed.
Under the name of the Marquis of Jiang’an, no one dared question her. After leaving Guanghan Yueyuan, she circled the main hall, confirmed no one was watching, and slipped into the east building compartment, then passed through the hidden door into the crime scene for the second time.
With no one else present this time, she had to manage everything herself. Freed from that constraint, Ming Huashang could immerse herself far more deeply in the role of the killer. With some effort she moved the shelf aside and pushed the hidden door open.
The scene before her was unchanged from before. Ming Huashang went back to the writing table and simply sat down in the position Zhang Ziyun had occupied at the time of his death, shifting into the dead man’s perspective.
She leaned against the writing table and looked up at the ceiling beams, sitting there with a sense of strangeness she could not place.
If she were Zhang Ziyun, sitting in this spot, what would she be doing? She scanned the room, trying to explore Zhang Ziyun’s state of mind at the time. Her gaze drifted idly over the discarded paper on the floor, and she froze.
Why did these paintings look so odd — why did she have to turn her head to see them properly? She sat puzzling for a moment, then suddenly understood.
Of course. It was such an obvious flaw — how had she not noticed it before? The discarded sheets of paper all around were oriented the wrong way. They had clearly not been thrown from this position. And if Zhang Ziyun had been sitting here, he couldn’t have been looking at the painting, and there was no wine within reach either. He couldn’t have just been sitting here staring at the ceiling beams for amusement.
This meant that this was not where Zhang Ziyun had lost consciousness. He had been smothered somewhere else, and then dragged to the side of the writing table afterward.
Ming Huashang rolled swiftly to her feet, then tried to put herself in Zhang Ziyun’s place — thinking about where he would actually have been. She swept the room with her eyes and noticed the small tea table.
Looking at the pile of discarded sheets, Zhang Ziyun’s attempts grew worse and worse as they went on, and his mood had grown extremely agitated. In that state, he would very likely have turned to drink for solace — and inadvertently drunk his way into a stupor from the Overlapping Dream Powder in the wine, remaining unconscious until the killer arrived.
Ming Huashang approached the tea table. On the small table was arranged a set of exquisite Western Region wine vessels. One of the cups had rolled onto the floor; beside the table legs sat an unopened jar of wine. According to what Yuhu had said, there should have been another jar here as well — the one that had been half-consumed — which had already been taken away.
Ming Huashang crouched close to the floor, searching for suspicious traces. She had been lying there for some time, and when she rose her head swam slightly. Her elbow inadvertently knocked something behind her.
Metal struck the floor with a sharp, clear ring. Ming Huashang was startled. She quickly covered the wine vessel with her hands, went rigid, and held perfectly still.
Fortunately, it was a close call only — no one outside seemed to have noticed. Ming Huashang slowly let out a breath and moved to set the wine vessel back on the small table, murmuring under her breath: “Who on earth placed this wine vessel so close to the edge? Don’t they know it might get knocked over?”
Just as she was about to set it down, Ming Huashang’s hand abruptly stopped. She stared at the hammered and chiselled lotus-patterned high-footed cup on the table, then looked at the wine vessel with the coiling makara pattern and slender neck in her hand, and was silent for a long moment.
She did not know much about Buddhist iconography, but she at least recognised the creature on the wine vessel — the makara, with its long trunk, sharp teeth, fish body, and fish tail, venerated in Buddhism as the spirit of rivers and the source of life. Yet the lotus flower pattern on the cups was the most traditional Central Plains motif, albeit worked in the Sogdian repoussé technique.
A complete set of gold vessels would not be cheap, and the patterns would naturally have been matched as a set. There was no reason for the wine vessel to bear a Buddhist design while the cups bore a Central Plains design — unless this was not actually a complete set, and the original wine vessel that had been placed here had been substituted by someone.
Why would the killer swap the wine vessel? What secret did the original vessel hold that could not bear scrutiny?
Ming Huashang had a sudden flash of inspiration, and a daring theory took shape in her mind.
What if there had been evidence of the killer’s involvement on the wine vessel — evidence that, once revealed, would point directly to the killer with fatal consequences? But after the body was discovered, the room had been occupied continuously, and later the authorities arrived and pasted a seal on the door. With no opportunity to destroy the evidence, the killer had had no choice but to seize the cover of deep night and take the desperate risk of returning to the scene to retrieve the wine vessel.
And this wine had been prepared by Yuqiong — before the madam arrived, it had been Yuqiong and Zhang Ziyun drinking and painting together.
That thought was like a single spark in the dark — instantly igniting a prairie fire. The other doubts that had plagued Ming Huashang for so long all resolved themselves in its wake. The light in her eyes flickered with alternating brightness. A thread was finally taking shape in her mind.
She finally understood what had been nagging at her this whole time. Ming Huazhang had spotted the hidden door because of a sliver of light coming through the wall gap — yet looking at the scene, the killer had clearly been an extremely careful and meticulous person. Why, then, had they been so careless when leaving — so negligent as to not even fully close the hidden door?
Ming Huashang had previously assumed the killer had been in a hurry — that when fleeing the scene in haste, one could not possibly account for every detail. But what if the killer simply could not see when leaving?
Feng Qing Si Yuan had no light; the compartment was pitch dark. So when the door was closed, the killer had not realised the gap had not aligned properly. But when Zhang Ziyun’s death was discovered it had been nighttime, and the private room’s lamps had been burning bright. When the mute servant crept toward the private room this morning, it had been fully daylight. The contrast between inside and outside would have been so sharp that it should have been obvious — unless one could not see.
The only moment that satisfied the condition of total darkness was the previous night — which also coincided perfectly with the killer’s need to return to the scene to destroy evidence. Therefore the mute servant could be eliminated as a suspect.
The madam could equally be eliminated. After all, the madam had been the first person to discover the body. If she had left behind a crucial piece of evidence, she could have simply tucked the wine vessel into her sleeve when she called for help. There was no need to come back in the dead of night.
Ming Huashang’s heart was racing now, blood surging through her body. So then — the only person who met all conditions was the one who appeared not to have gone out last night, yet who could have climbed from her room through the ventilation window onto the staircase and slipped through the hidden door without anyone’s knowledge: Yuqiong.
No wonder, when Ming Huashang had entered the scene, the whole room had felt natural and undisturbed, with no sense that anything had been tampered with. That was precisely the killer’s brilliance — everything was as it should be. Even this wine set was a consistent set of Western Region gold vessels, distinguished only by different surface designs.
A detail like that — who besides Ming Huashang, born to wealth and with a deep love of fine food and drink, would ever have noticed?
Ming Huashang grew excited. She hurriedly replaced the wine vessel and, holding up her hem, ran back.
She ran breathlessly back to the west building, not even stopping to apologise when she bumped into someone on the way. She pushed open the door to Jiang Ling’s room and said excitedly: “Brother… Young Master — I know!”
Jiang Ling had just been about to go and look for her. He was startled when the door was suddenly flung open. He quickly pulled Ming Huashang inside, closed the door, and said: “Are you out of your mind? Forgot to give the signal before entering? There are still people inside — what if someone outside saw you?”
Only then did Ming Huashang slowly recall: yes, the Xuan Xiaowei did have that rule, and she had simply been too excited and had completely forgotten such an important procedure. Ming Huashang suppressed her exhilaration and said quietly: “I know who the killer is!”
Jiang Ling looked toward the others who were busy in the inner room and said: “What a coincidence — just before you pushed that door open, Ming Huazhang said the same thing, and was about to send me to find you. I hadn’t even left yet when you came running back yourself. The killer you two have worked out — is it the same person?”
Ming Huazhang heard that Ming Huashang was back and only raised his eyes to glance at her, then said to her unhurriedly: “Come here.”
Ming Huashang bounded over. Ming Huazhang took her hand and drew her naturally to his side.
Ming Huashang looked curiously at what lay before them. Ren Yao was grinding ink; Xie Jichuan was painting; Ming Huazhang stood with his hands behind his back watching. As a combination, it looked entirely surreal.
After watching for a moment, Ming Huashang slowly recognised the subject: “Brother Xie is painting the screen from downstairs?”
“I’m copying it.” Xie Jichuan corrected precisely.
“Oh, reproducing it.” Ming Huashang asked: “What is reproducing it for?”
Xie Jichuan’s brush flew across the paper. The mountains and rivers took form beneath his brush with breathtaking speed, all the details of the main hall screen reproduced in miniature. Hearing Ming Huashang’s question, Xie Jichuan curled the corner of his mouth slightly in sardonic amusement: “I also want to know. What is this for?”
Ming Huazhang saw he had finished the first layer of mountains, and called a timely halt: “Stop there. Ren Yao — get the scissors and cut along the ink lines to separate the painting.”
Jiang Ling also crowded in to watch. Even someone as artistically uncultivated as he could not help his astonishment: “What? A painting this beautiful — cut it up?”
“Yes, cut it.” Ming Huazhang swept Xie Jichuan with a measured glance and said: “The artist is magnanimous with great discernment, far above petty concerns — he won’t mind sacrificing a copy.”
Xie Jichuan gave a cold laugh: “You really are free with other people’s property.”
Ming Huazhang paid Xie Jichuan no attention. Seeing Ren Yao’s hesitant expression, he asked: “What is it? Can’t bring yourself to do it?”
“It’s not that.” Ren Yao said candidly: “There are no scissors.”
The air went briefly still. Ming Huazhang composed himself unhurriedly and said: “Use a blade then. Take care with the edges — follow the ink lines exactly, without leaving any white border.”
Ming Huashang watched Ren Yao and Jiang Ling, each wielding a narrow blade, leaning over the painting and scoring carefully at it, and fell genuinely silent. Ming Huazhang saw that both the painting and the cutting would take time, and turned to ask Ming Huashang: “Just now when you came running in, what was it you said you knew?”
“Oh.” Ming Huashang remembered: “Second Brother, when I searched the crime scene a second time, I found that the wine vessel on the tea table in Feng Qing Si Yuan had been swapped out.”
Ming Huazhang’s expression became serious. He gestured to indicate positions: “On this side of the table?”
Ming Huashang nodded and used Ming Huazhang’s hand as a reference point: “There were a wine jar and wine vessels here. I examined the vessels and found the wine vessel bore a coiling makara pattern, while the four cups had a lotus flower design. Tianxiang Tower is wealthy enough to commission a complete set of gold wine vessels — there’s no reason they would pair cups and vessel from different sets. So I suspect the wine vessel was swapped by someone. To risk going back to the crime scene at that stage shows that the wine vessel must have carried evidence extremely damaging to the killer. Returning to tidy up loose ends after the fact — this is completely at odds with the cold composure the killer displayed when planning the murder. So I suspect something went wrong with Zhang Ziyun’s death: at some midpoint, something interfered, causing the killer’s original plan to fall apart, forcing them to patch it up afterward.”
Ming Huazhang listened with great care, nodding at intervals in response. Jiang Ling was not managing the blade as deftly as Ren Yao and had been elbowed aside by her. With nothing else to do, he caught the latter part of what Ming Huashang said and asked: “The way you tell it, the killer would have to be…”
Ming Huashang, Ming Huazhang, and even Xie Jichuan, still at work behind them with his brush, all said simultaneously: “Yuqiong.”
The words had barely been spoken when Xie Jichuan set down the final stroke of his mountains. He put the brush down and rolled out his wrist, smiling: “Second Little Sister, you win.”
He was proud of his intelligence, and even as Ming Huazhang had him reproduce Yuqiong’s painting, he had not wavered in his own conclusion. But with Ming Huashang’s return and her disclosure that the wine vessel at the scene had been swapped, and with the mountain ranges rising stroke by stroke under his brush, his mind had moved like a small boat crossing a river, the clouds parting to reveal clarity.
He had made careful preparations for a fight, and yet he had been undone by a young woman’s instinct. The killer was not the madam. It was Yuqiong.
Jiang Ling had followed only some of this and asked: “That can’t be right — after the hour of Xu, Yuqiong was in the west building the whole time. She never went to the east building, not even after Zhang Ziyun was found. How did she do it?”
“That is precisely what these paintings are for.” Ming Huazhang looked toward Ren Yao: “Finished?”
Ren Yao set down a mountain that had been cut out, flexed her fingers, and said: “One more left.”
“That one doesn’t need to be cut — just hold it roughly in position.” Ming Huazhang gathered up all the paintings and said: “Xie Jichuan, Jiang Ling, Ren Yao — the three of you stand back. Huashang, come and stand across from me. Hold this edge here.”
Ming Huashang helped Ming Huazhang sort through the pages, pinched the edge of the sheets of paper, and held them upright. Ming Huazhang asked: “What do you see?”
Xie Jichuan folded his arms and said nothing. Jiang Ling shrugged: “A painting of a lot of mountains.”
“And now?”
Jiang Ling tilted his head, thoroughly confused: “Isn’t this still just a painting?”
“And now?”
Jiang Ling fell silent, no longer speaking. The shadows on the floor had already told them everything. Xie Jichuan exhaled softly, unfolded his arms, and said: “The imagination and skill required to conceive of such a method — this is the most extraordinary thing I have witnessed in my life.”
Ming Huazhang signalled for everything to be put away. Ming Huashang lowered her head and looked at her fingertips.
Between her fingers were several layers of paper. When Ming Huazhang spoke, she quietly moved the layers apart. And yet from where Jiang Ling stood, it had looked like a single painting — he had had to watch her shift them twice before he saw.
Ming Huashang quietly exhaled. She thought: she now understood how Yuqiong had committed murder in plain sight.
Tianxiang Tower had a particular layout, and everyone — Ming Huashang included — had assumed that to get from the west building to the east building, one had to pass through the main hall. Unless one could perform magic, and pass right through a painting.
Yet Yuqiong had truly done exactly that — she had walked through the painting’s world.
When the eye perceives, it automatically makes sense of depth and distance — which is how landscape paintings come to exist. When the soaring mountains and thousand-li panoramas of an entire space are compressed into a single thin sheet of paper, everyone would praise the artist for their masterful illusion and divine skill.
Yuqiong had exploited that automatic assumption in reverse, manufacturing a visual illusion. She had meticulously calibrated the size of each mountain, ensuring that every peak existed as an independent layer. When spread out layer by layer, the mountains viewed from the front appeared a lush and undulating plane — any observer would instinctively assume this was a flat painting. But viewed from the side, the mountains were three-dimensional, with a narrow passage between each layer.
On the night of the performance, when the curtains on both sides had been lowered, Yuqiong had bribed a maid and arranged in advance for the screen along the back wall of the main hall to be separated into its individual layers, with a gap between them just wide enough for her to pass through.
The colouring on the mountain surfaces used the most expensive gemstone pigments — imperishable for a thousand years, with extraordinary colour depth — and a woman crouching low and passing through from behind would not be noticed at all unless one were actively looking.
The audience seated directly facing the screen was deceived by their own eyes, naturally assuming that the background was a flat painting and giving it no second thought. Those like Yuhu seated at an angle had their view blocked by the curtains, and moreover, everyone’s attention was on the central performance stage — no one would pay any attention to the backdrop.
Yuqiong had thus — right before a hall full of guests — swaggered through the painting layers, committed the murder, and then calmly walked back.
More details came rushing back to Ming Huashang. The mountain-and-river screen in the main hall had taken Yuqiong a full month to complete. Given her ability, if this had been merely a conventional landscape, a single month should not have been necessary. The mountains were bold, free, and layered in abundance, yet the edges of each mountain form had been outlined with a heavy application of vivid malachite. Ming Huashang had originally taken that for a contour line — now she understood: Yuqiong had used dense coats of powdered gemstone to conceal the gaps between the separate painting layers.
And those fine grooves in the screen’s base — not errors in craftsmanship, but deliberate. When the base was disassembled, these wooden pieces could separate like mortise-and-tenon joints, each section supporting one painting layer independently, allowing each mountain to stand on its own. Afterward they could be fitted together again like blocks of a building, restoring the whole to a seamless flat surface.
Today, when she had been looking at the landscape screen downstairs, a maid had said proudly that they simply did not understand this painting. Ming Huashang had assumed the maid was mocking those who merely imitated the manners of the cultured without genuine appreciation — never imagining that she herself was equally unseeing.
Judging by the maid’s expression, she must have known the screen’s secret — and the person who had helped Yuqiong set it up the night in question was most likely that very maid. This would be easy to confirm by simply checking the maid’s movements.
Ming Huashang thought back to the painting of the incense burner and immortal realm in the crime scene — the smoke curling around the window lattice, so powerfully convincing. She should have thought of it earlier. Yuqiong had genuine talent in painting, and an exceptional command of spatial depth and three-dimensionality. The thousand-layered mountain screen was the joke she had played on every person in the room right under their noses.
What a pity — a hall full of guests, and not one had truly understood her work. Every single one of them had been a seeing person who was effectively blind.
After discovering the screen’s secret, the locked room was truly, finally solved. Ming Huashang was in awe and asked: “Who figured this out?”
None of the others spoke. They pointed with their eyes to Ming Huazhang. Ming Huashang turned, and asked with genuine curiosity: “Second Brother — something this absurd — how did you think of it?”
Ming Huazhang said: “Actually, I have Jiang Ling to thank. If he hadn’t reminded me, I wouldn’t have thought to look in this direction.”
Ming Huashang looked at Jiang Ling. Jiang Ling himself was stunned, pointing uncertainly at himself: “Me?”
“People say ‘seeing is believing, hearing is not.’ Who would have thought that the eyes can also deceive. Just like crackle-glazed porcelain — covered all over in fine cracks, so that even if you added one true crack, the eye would automatically overlook it. It was Jiang Ling who reminded me, and I realised the eyes cannot always be trusted.”
Ming Huazhang felt a pang of something close to sorrow: “That a woman of such talent should appear in a brothel, forced to entertain clients with a smile to survive — this is truly a tragedy. If her family had not met with misfortune, with her gifts she would have had no difficulty making her name throughout Chang’an. She might have become the new master of the art of ink painting, the successor to Right Minister Yan.”
Ming Huashang listened, her mood heavy. Ren Yao was even more moved, feeling a kinship of sorrow with Yuqiong’s fate. Jiang Ling saw that everyone had grown so sombre and could not help but ask: “So why did she swap the wine vessel? And why did the madam put medicine in Zhang Ziyun’s wine?”
“Those are questions for Yuqiong herself.” Ming Huazhang quickly drew himself back from his melancholy. His eyes were dark and bright, as ever the calm and clear-headed, decisive team leader. “And — our primary objective for this mission: the map of the Grand Ming Palace.”